Abstract
The epyllia of the Elizabethan period, often referred to as historical complaint poetry, enjoyed several especially fruitful decades toward the end of the sixteenth century.1 Samuel Daniel made his literary début with The Complaint of Rosamond (1592), and most likely William Shakespeare made his with The Rape of Lucrece (1594), followed shortly by Venus and Adonis. Many other poets followed suit, including Michael Drayton and Anthony Chute, thus providing an interesting counterpoint to the popular male-voiced sonnet. For the most part, these complaints are narrated by women, usually young women whose chastity is threatened by a man in a higher social position—as a result they, as much as the poems in the Mirror tradition, concern themselves with the uses and abuses of royal and aristocratic power.2
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Notes
An interesting counterpoint to the gendered implications of complaint can be found in Drayton’s Peirs Gaveston, printed in 1594, the same year as the more traditional Matilda. See Kelly Quinn, “Mastering Complaint: Michael Drayton’s Peirs Gaveston and the Royal Mistress Complaints,” English Literary Renaissance 38 (2008): 439–60.
Meredith Anne Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 97.
Samuel Daniel, “The Complaint of Rosamond,” in Motives of Woe, ed. John Kerrigan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 164–90, lines 25–28. A broadside ballad (STC 22463.5) extant in 1620 also makes an explicit connection between the two women.
Michael Drayton, “To my most dearely-loved friend Henery Reynolds Esquire,” The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 3:26–31 (l. 126).
Bart Van Es, “Michael Drayton, Literary History, and Historians in Verse,” Review of English Studies 59 (2007): 255.
See Jean R. Brink, Michael Drayton Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 41–45, for a discussion of the dedications in the 1597 edition of the Heroicall Epistles.
Also Dick Taylor, “Drayton and the Countess of Bedford,” Studies in Philology 49 (1952): 214–28, for a more general study of Drayton’s relationship with one of his patrons.
Van Es, 266; Richard F. Hardin, “Convention and Design in Drayton’s ‘Heroicall Epistles,’” Publications of the Modern Language Association 83 (1968): 35–41.
Stephen Guy-Bray, “Rosamond’s complaint: Daniel, Ovid, and the purpose of poetry,” Renaissance Studies 22 (2008): 340.
Barbara C. Ewell, “Unity and the Transformation of Drayton’s Poetics in Englands Heroicall Epistles,” Modern Language Quarterly 4 4 (1983): 234.
Danielle Clarke, “Ovid ’s Heroides, Drayton and the articulation of the feminine in the English Renaissance,” Renaissance Studies 22 (2008): 387.
Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft in England1558–1618 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 56–57.
Samuel Daniel, “The Epistle Dedicatorie,” in The Civil Wars, ed. Laurence Michel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 67–69 (16–22). All references will be to this edition (CW), which reproduces the 1609 text, except where otherwise noted.
See Lea Frost, “Anxiety of Representation,” cited earlier; Alzada Tipton, “Caught between ‘Virtue’ and ‘Memorie’: Providential and Political Historiography in Samuel Daniel’s The Civil Wars,” Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (1998): 325–41.
Gillian Wright, “What Daniel Really Did with the Pharsalia: The Civil Wars, Lucan, and King James,” Review of English Studies 55 (2004): 215.
Gillian Wright, “The Politics of Revision in Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars,” English Literary Renaissance 38 (2008): 478.
Phillip Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy,” in The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 216.
Arber, Stationer’s Company, vol. 4, 177. Richard F. Hardin, Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1973), 66–71
and Brink, 113–16 focus on the poem’s subversive elements and the problems with dating, while Thomas Cogswell, “The Path to Elysium ‘Lately Discovered’: Drayton and the Early Stuart Court,” Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991): 209–17 makes a convincing case for its use as propaganda.
William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Routledge, 1995), Ep., 13.
Maguire, Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 10–11.
Ben Jonson, The Devilis an Ass and Other Plays, ed. M. J. Kidnie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2.4.8–15.
K. B. McFarlane, “The Wars of the Roses,” England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (London: Hambledon, 1981), 232.
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© 2012 Kavita Mudan Finn
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Finn, K.M. (2012). “The fetters of her sex”: Voicing Queens in the Historical Poetry of Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel. In: The Last Plantagenet Consorts. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392991_8
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